


The World, According to Sam

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:20:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean ruins everything, and so does Sam. But they wouldn't have it any other way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World, According to Sam

**Author's Note:**

> Written after S4

Dean has this terrible and outstanding talent to tear down Sam’s world with a single well-placed blunder, like some cataclysmic force of nature, and leave him picking the fragments out of the dust, glass shards that cut his fingers to a bloody mess and leave iron-coloured smears on the pieces he tries to superglue back together.

 

It’s not his fault, never his fault, because the poor, well-intentioned fuckhead doesn’t know, but it might have been more than half the reason Sam left, buried under the flimsy excuse of hatred for being his father’s army brat. Too many days of watching his brother’s freckles grow and spread like a dust storm in slow-motion across his skin in the shifting light of a sun that somehow always looks different, depending on the time of year and region of the country. Too many days of trying to decipher a meaning with any significance from behind his flickering eyes and too-frequent smile, trying do decide when and if it was ever genuine. It broke him, every time, and it’s why he left and why he came back.

 

Dean and his complete disregard for manners or convention, sneaking in the window like a thief in the night, with nothing but his easy smile and frayed nerves, concern for their father, had again ripped Sam’s world to bright, screaming fragments, like sunlight diluted through glass when he had a headache, and he’d been having too many of those lately, anyway. It left him too disoriented to do anything except follow, because Dean needed him.  _Needed_ him, and that still and always would take precedence.

 

And then Jess died, and Sam thought he would, too.

 

But a few weeks later, when he managed to sleep for more than a few restless hours, he woke up with the thought,  _Better Jess than Dean_ in the forefront of his mind, he knew he was going to survive this, as much as he hated himself at the time. Hated that she wasn’t even dead a month and his heart was already slamming into his throat when he left the motel and found Dean working under the hood of the Impala one morning, thin shirt sweat-soaked and riding up over his ribs.

 

Motherfucking hell, he was supposed to be  _over_ that, freak side effect of his adolescence and isolation.

 

For two years, he was falling and couldn’t get a hand- or foot-hold. Trying to piece himself together just to have Dean unknowingly ruin it again, tear him to jagged shards. On one case, he knocked over a snow globe, which shattered on the floor, and almost didn’t hear his brother’s hissed curses at his clumsiness, looked at it dumbly for a minute and thought, That’s me.

 

Sam almost killed him once, that first year. It wasn’t the asylum case and it wasn’t Dean’s stupid, self-sacrificing desire to save him at any cost. It was because he couldn’t drive well enough to avoid getting slammed head-on by an eighteen-wheeler. And that was stupid, stupid because he’d already been thinking about the future, what they needed to do, to plan, in order to have that fucking demon cornered, and didn’t pay attention for a second to the  _now._ And that, that was blamed on the demon driving the truck, but really, it was more him.

 

And Dean almost died, but Dad got in the way of that, made a deal with the same piece of shit who had murdered his wife and ruined his and his sons’ lives, and it broke Dean’s heart, but for Sam it wasn’t quite there. The realisation came as a shock, didn’t wound him in the heart until he saw what it did to his brother, instead lodged itself up under his ribs where his father still was—grudgingly, often and preferably ignored, but still there after all this time and all those fights—and tore them free. They were his regret for the death of a man he’d thought he’d hated, but it hurt too goddamned much to keep lying to himself about that.

 

But Dean wasn’t dead like he’d almost been, comatose and almost definitely three quarters of the way to being a ghost, and Sam refused to feel guilty for the bubble of happiness that rose in him like a hot air balloon sometimes, sitting in the Impala’s passenger seat after Dean fixed her, thanking God that they were safe, and that no matter the cost, Dean was  _there._

 

At the end of the second year, Sam died, and when he woke up he thought he was still dead. It was a terrible doubt before Dean came back, standing and walking and wondering vaguely if ghosts could feel pain as vividly as he did where Jake had knifed him.

 

He wonders if he knew the truth, even back then, even before he dragged the story out of his brother in halts and stammers. _One year._ Sam stopped falling and landed on the ground, hard, his world not just shattered by the impact but pulverised. Without that structure, he was a good as insane, and maybe that was why he did what he did next.

 

Sam had known Dean wanted it as surely as he’d known neither of them would ever start it, knew it in an abstract way, half-consciously and uselessly. Useless, because there was an unspoken understanding that Sam went that way sometimes and Dean never did and they just weren’t talking about it because it would be a stupid, awkward conversation, and it wasn’t like Dean had a problem with it, because he  _didn’t._ That wasn’t why his body stiffened and shutters dropped behind his face and eyes when Sam came back sometimes, smelling like cologne instead of perfume. Because when it was perfume, he made fun of his kid brother, teased him a little, but after that had gotten old the same, tense line formed between his shoulders. Different names for the same thing.

 

Dean never had a  _problem_ with it, and that wasn’t why he shoved Sam up against a wall three weeks and four days after his crossroads deal, or why they ended up in bed with Dean’s legs wrapped around Sam’s waist. It was messy and desperate and painful and wrong, not because of who they were but because of the time they’d chosen to do it.

 

And Sam couldn’t save him. He spent the rest of that year watching the doomsday clock ticking down to midnight, torn between trusting his big brother like he’d done all his life and diving after the least chance he got, which came in the form of a demon riding a blonde girl without a name or a past. When he failed, the last, pulverised remnants of his world disappeared, blew away in hurricane-force winds.

 

He’d had all of Dean, been in fucking love with him to the point where it hurt, and now that was all just gone, the world transformed into a cold and bitter place, and one afternoon he woke up in a drunken stupor to find his forehead resting on an open copy of  _The Great Gatsby,_ stained and smeared with tears and snot and drool. Mourning was only beautiful in poetry.

 

 _—he had lost the old warm world—_

 _—living too long with a single dream—_

 

 _—unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves—_

 

 _—what a grotesque thing a rose it—_

 _—how raw the sunlight was—_

 _—a new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about—_

 

He grinned stiffly, and that hurt; the corners of his mouth had forgotten how to turn upwards. That made so much sense.

 

Dean was gone, dead, damned, and Sam would never be able to stop that from echoing in his head all day, in and out of his dreams, and for the first time he had to build a world that his brother hadn’t wrecked before, devoid of all parts of him except for his memory. Sam built himself a palace of glass and crystal and ice shards, full of locked doors behind which he put a woman he wished had lived long enough for him to know her, a man who he didn’t know he’d loved until it was too late, a girl he’d as good as killed by keeping her ignorant, the spotless, sugar-coating of a life he could have had, and his stupid, beautiful martyr of a brother who he’d loved more than the earth and sun and stars, who’d slammed into his world like a wrecking ball countless times, ignorant of his effect, who Sam would give absolutely anything to have back, even for a minute. But these were dead and buried, salted and burned and sealed inside crypts, and what’s dead should stay dead. The main rooms he kept for a demon who was making him stronger by poisoning him slowly—and he’d always known that, but had been too far gone too care—and for the bitter, acid taste of revenge, all he had left to go on.

 

Then Dean came back and found him with a girl he thought was a whore, found her underwear hanging around the room, and when Sam hugged him their faces were already closed to each other, hiding lies, hiding how the fragile world Sam had built was already crashing about his ears, and knowing whatever they’d done in desperation was over, because now there were light-years between them, filled with the lives they’d had in the four months— _forty years_ —of separation.

 

They spent the next year arguing and taking shots in the dark. Angels and demons and fucking trust issues between them like they’re some couple in high school and the real, actual world breaking to pieces, the apocalypse like in the bible, and even Sam, who credited that shit more than Dean ever would, can hardly believe it. It’s the real doomsday clock this time, signs and seals and the world coming to an end, and most of the time it feels like the walls are closing in on him and the ceiling’s collapsing and he can’t breathe. He becomes an addict and finds himself on a downward spiral, sees the world in shades of blood-red before it even starts bleeding.

 

Sam loses count of the amount of times they almost kill each other, and the amount of times they save each other in return. In the end it all cancels out and leaves them together at the end of the day, grimfaced and chasing the sunset, panic rising silently in their throats.

 

When they fight it gets too physical too fast, and in the middle of it Sam wants to slam Dean against the wall and fuck into his brand-new, healed body because he  _knows_ it’ll hurt like a bitch, and it just pisses him off more. What’s even worse is that he knows Dean wouldn’t stop him, would probably even encourage it. Sometimes, Sam wants to leave the angels and demons and Ruby and Castiel and Lilith and the rest of them, take Dean away to someplace they can live out their final days in peace, can breathe. But they’re too wound up in this for any sort of escape, and Sam  _hates_ it, keeps hunting and fighting and digging himself deeper, because that’s all he knows.

 

He finds out the truth too late, and thinks,  _parallelism,_ when he realises he broke the last seal like his brother broke the first. It’s too literary to be real, them standing at ground zero while a monster worse than any they’ve fought and killed breaks free, and they’re the ones who did this, started and finished it and might as well have done everything in between. Standing here, Sam is filled with dread and fascination, no room left to hate heaven for lying to them or Ruby for betraying them. It’s strange, that his world was shattered for what he thinks will be the last and final time when he saw Dean again, saw the truth in his eyes, except that this time it wasn’t his fault.

 

Sam fists his hands in his brother’s shirt and feels Dean tugging at the front of his as they watch the explosion. He turns to Dean with the light spotting in front of his eyes, and wonders if he should try to find the words to explain what Dean does to him, wrecks his world like a tsunami must a wooden ship, wonders if he should just kiss him goodbye because for the time being they’re still human. Then he sees Dean’s eyes through the blinding light and wind, sees glass shards and skyscrapers falling through the green fog and does neither, because he realises Dean has known all along.

 

He holds onto him because Dean was always the only thing worth holding onto, says  _He’s coming,_ but what he really means is goodbye.

 

~End.


End file.
